World's Largest Plant Factory With LED Lighting Built In Quake-Hit City

SENDAI (Kyodo) -- The world's largest plant factory using light-emitting diode lighting has been built in a northeastern Japanese city devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, the factory operator said Wednesday.

Mirai Co., a Tokyo-based company that runs vegetable growing factories, said it constructed a factory on about 2,300 square meters of land in Tagajo, Miyagi Prefecture, to produce 10,000 heads of lettuce and other vegetables a day to sell to local supermarkets.

The company plans to hire more than 30 local people as part of efforts to help revive the local economy.

The vegetable sales company is looking to build more such factories in areas not suited for farming as they are "unaffected by weather conditions and not damaged by seawater brought by tsunami," Mirai President Shigeharu Shimamura said at a media event for the unveiling of the new factory.

LED lighting helps cut electricity consumption by 40 percent compared with fluorescent lighting and can control the amount of vegetables by utilizing its wavelength.